Smithsonian blows another story

This month’s gaffe?

Omitting hugely important relevant information about Judaism in its story on the alleged Hispanic Jews of the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado.

A bit of background.

For generations if not centuries, rumors have swirled that some Spanish the original territory of Mexico, including the Mexican Northwest or our Desert Southwest, actually were Marranos — descendents of Spanish Jews who were “passing” to avoid the Inquisition.

Per the story, I agree with Judith Neulander, an ethnographer and co-director of the Judaic Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (and many others) and disagree with University of New Mexico prof Stanley M. Hordes. These are Spanish-Americans who picked up some type of Adventism, whether from today’s official Seventh-Day Adventist Chruch or elsewhere; they’re NOT marranos.

(Note to Mr. Hordes: Outside the American flag, two hundred or even one hundred years ago, six points was the normal way to make a star; that’s NOT the Magen David, necessarily, on tombs. At least some Adventists officially practice circumcision.

But, that’s an issue of interpretation, not the gaffe I’m going to talk about.

Here’s where the story blows it. And, if the author, Jeff Wheelwright, was that ignorant of Jewish groups and distinctions, he shouldn’t have been writing this story in the first place. And, if the Smithsonian can’t have an editor pick up on the difference between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, then the mag really is in trouble.

Because THAT’s the gaffe.

In a nutshell, the alleged marranos of San Luis have been found to have a higher-than-statistically probable rate of a breast cancer precursor gene, 185delAG. The story notes that “the genetic mutation that caused the virulent breast cancer had previously been found primarily in Jewish people whose ancestral home was Central or Eastern Europe.”

Well, beyond the bare bones of geographic separation, those Jews are Ashkenazi; the Jews of Spain are Sephardic.

Of course, there’s argument that the genetic mutatin is not limited to Ashkenazi. If that’s true, well, then the story is wrong in another way, and Wheelwright shouldn’t have written what he did.

In the title, I noted that Smithsonian blows another story. This has become a recent problem.

In recent months, on straight history it has claimed the Acoma Indians built their Sky City pueblo for protection from Navajos 400 years before Navajos arrived in the Southwest, and misidentified a Canyonlands National Park picture as coming from Arches. (It corrected the photo mistake, but did nothing about the far more egregious error.)

On news analysis, it picked the wrong 20th-century political conventions as the top four of the century, and so far, at least, hasn’t even deigned to look at 19th-century ones.

I had hoped things would get better with Lawrence Small finally getting a well-deserved boot as Smithsonian secretary.

Instead, the magazine, at least, gets worse, and the Institute has the gall to send me a fundraiser e-mail last week on top of this.